The reason for the failure of the pollsters to come anywhere near to the election result is simple: they tend to rely on telephone and online polls. Both routinely result in samples which are not representative of the population. Telephone polls are undermined by the large number of people who are unwilling to answer questions and the time of day when calls are made, for example, if you ring during the day you are likely to get a different sample than if you ring in the evening. Online polls rely on (1) people being online and moderately IT savvy – which excludes many people – and (2) what are in effect focus groups formed of people who put themselves forward (which will mean they are unrepresentative of the general population regardless of the attempt to choose them in the context of their backgrounds ) who are questioned regularly( which precludes even the basic shuffling of the sample pack created every time an entirely new sample is questioned.)

The exit poll came much closer to the actual result because (1) it was a very large sample (20,000), (2) people were interviewed face to face and (3) the people interviewed had actually voted. The pollsters need to go back to face to face interviewing and more rigorous selection of polling samples.

The Conservative Party has a formal Commons majority of 12. Sinn Fein have four seats and if they follow their normal practice of not taking up those seats the majority would effectively be 16. Add in the Speaker of the House who does not vote except when a vote is tied, and the majority is effectively 17 (The Commons has 650 MPs. Deduct the Sinn Fein MPs and the Speaker and a practical majority is 323. The Tories have 331 seats. That leaves 314 opposition MPs. The practical majority is 17). Such a majority is just about a working one.

Even a twelve seat majority is functional because though it may look fragile, in practice all opposition MPs will not vote against the government on many issues. This can be for ideological reasons (they broadly agree with the legislation), they think voting against a Bill would play badly with the public or the simple fact that the Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and many opposition English seat MPs have constituencies which are hundreds of miles away from London. Tory seats tend to be much nearer London than opposition ones. Moreover, if the government wants to play difficult , they can always refuse to allow pairing of MPs (MPs of different parties agree not to vote, thus cancelling one another’s votes out) . That would put a burden on their own MPs, but much less of a one than that placed on opposition MPs, because, as already explained, Tory MPs on average have much less distance to travel to and from their constituencies than do opposition MPs.

The size of the Conservative majority will give their backbenchers far more leverage on the government. This will be healthy because it will re-assert the power of the Commons over the executive .

In the first couple of years much of the major legislation going through will command widespread support amongst Conservative MPs. However, if the Cabinet starts backtracking on their manifesto promises the Tory backbenchers will want to know the reason why and will rebel if pushed too hard in a direction they do not wish to go. (Cameron was rash enough at the first Cabinet meeting of the new government to promise that the Tory manifesto would be implemented in full – go in at 11.32 am ) .

Because of the small majority, the Conservative government should push through as soon as possible all their most important legislation. This includes the EU referendum , English votes for English laws, the delayed boundary changes and the repeal of the Human Rights Act. The House of Lords can delay passing a Commons Bill for about a year. After that the government can force it through using the Parliament Act.

The government would be well advised to repeal the Fixed term Parliaments Act, not least because the small majority is likely to diminish before the end of the Parliament and even if it does not it will be very difficult for the government party to maintain its discipline for five years. The danger is a repeat of the last years of the Major government which saw constant Tory infighting and precious little being done in the last eighteen months or so.

The election told us that both the Tories and Labour are parties devoid of principle. Thatcher hollowed out the Tory Party converting it from a party which stood broadly for the national interest, strong on defence, protectionist where strategic industries such as coal were concerned , with its natural paternalism of the past sublimated into an acceptance of the welfare state. Blair cut out the central moral purpose of the Labour Party (to protect the poor and unfortunate) and replaced it with a toxic hybrid of Thatcherism with its the mania for privatisation both wholesale and piecemeal and greatly increased state spending, much of which was spent to no good purpose and whose justification seemed to be no more than the spending of the money for its own sake to show how “caring” NuLabour were.

While the SNP remain strong in Scotland Labour has no realistic chance of achieving an overall majority in the Commons. It is worth noting that Labour won 232 seats in this election compared with compared with 258 in the 2010 Election, a loss of 26 seats. As Labour lost 40 of their 41 seats in Scotland and only one seat in Wales this means they gained 13 seats in England. Thus there is some small glimmer of hope for Labour to if not win form a coalition as the leading party in it after the next General Election if the SNP vote collapses and the Labour vote increases by a few percentage votes in England. However, it is a very slim hope at present.

For the foreseeable future Labour are only likely to form a coalition government with the SNP.

Labour primarily did poorly because they have for long neglected the white working class (which was the natural bedrock of their support) and instead pandered to a motley collection of minority interest groups, most notably racial and ethnic minorities. Because they had split their support they ended up trying to produce a message which would appeal to wildly disparate groups. Their “core vote” strategy, which involved appealing to around a third of voters and then either adding a few more votes to gain a majority or at worst to be the dominant partner in a left of centre coalition, was both contemptible in a democracy because it ignored the interests of the majority and, as it turned out, a hideous failure.

If the Labour Party had been in a position to form a coalition they would have found themselves between the devil and the deep blue sea. If they had been able to form a majority in coalition with the SNP that would have finished them as an English party: if they refused to form such a coalition they would have been ruined in Scotland and damaged them in Wales on the grounds of having let in the Tories.

SNP political leverage within the House of Commons can only exist while there is no English Parliament. Create an English Parliament and the SNP are emasculated . The popularity of the SNP in Scotland is unlikely to last because there is growing dissatisfaction in Scotland at both its economic mismanagement and its increasingly authoritarian behaviour. Time is the enemy of the SNP as the dark reality of what they have created comes to fruition.

It has been claimed by many political commentators that a Tory government was just what the SNP wanted because it would fan the flames of Scottish nationalism and bogus victimhood. If this was the reasoning of the SNP leadership it was extremely stupid because it has rendered their party impotent at Westminster . The intelligent strategy for Sturgeon to have followed before the election would have been to say that the SNP would not have any formal relationship, whether coalition or a looser agreement , but would support any legislation which fitted in with SNP policies. There should have been no ruling out of any agreement with anyone, no demonising of any other Westminster Party, no threatening of England, no trying to portray the SNP as forcing left facing policies on England as being for England’s good . Had she done that the Tories might well not have been able to form a government off their own bat. Instead Sturgeon handed the Tories a victory which, if the Party was run by someone willing to look to England’s interests, would have left the SNP to twist impotently in the wind .

This was a profoundly dishonest election. There was a disturbing lack of debate by the major parties on important policy areas with foreign policy, defence, energy , food self-sufficiency and the imbalanced devolution settlement which grossly disadvantages England being barely addressed. Other major issues, for example immigration and the still massive deficit in the UK’s public finances were mentioned often enough, but without any proposals being put forward which would plausibly tackle the problems involved. Apart from Ukip, parties were either for open borders (The Greens) or restricted to promises to cut benefits for immigrants and operate a points system to ensure only skilled migrants came.( Even if such things could be done, there would not necessarily be a reduction in migrants because no upper limit was put on numbers). Proposals for increased government spending were either not costed at all or relied on fantasy money coming from “efficiency savings” within public service or absurdly optimistic forecasts of how the British economy would grow.

The housing crisis is the prime toxin in not only the British economy but also British society. The absurd cost of both renting and buying is reducing large parts of the population (and particularly those under 35 who have never got on the housing ladder) to a miserable, insecure existence. All the major parties made promises of building hundreds of thousands of new houses a year without meaningfully explaining where the money was coming from. Moreover, much of what they did promise – 200,00 to -300,000 new flats and houses a year – will inevitably be taken by immigrants because no major party could say these homes would be reserved for native Britons because no major party is willing to pull out of the EU. Net immigration is currently running at around 300,00 a year . If it continues at that level new immigrants will want at least 100,000 homes a year. This fact went unmentioned by the Tories, Labour and the LIbDems. To put the cherry on the housing mess, the Tories attempted to bribe, probably successfully, 2.5 million housing association tenants with an extension of the Right-to-Buy to such properties (this gives substantial discounts on the market price of a property). This will reduce the number properties which people can actually afford to rent in places such as London even further.

David Cameron sanctioned a number of very risky manifesto commitments such as promising English votes for English laws, a referendum on the EU and the repeal of the Human Rights Act. The most plausible explanation for this is he did not believe the Tories would win an overall majority and had put these items into the Tory manifesto simply to use as bargaining chips which he could discard in the event of another coalition with the LIbDems. If that was Cameron’s strategy it reinforces the idea of the leading politicians in Britain being complete cynics. The Tories also recklessly promised no rise in income tax, national insurance or VAT in the next Parliament. They will have to live with that millstone around their necks for five years.

Political correctness still has a terrible hold on those permitted a public voice. The most notable example of this was probably when the Ukip leader Nigel Farage had the courage in one of the leaders’ debates to raise the question of foreign HIV sufferers coming to Britain for very expensive and ongoing treatment on the NHS. He was howled at by the studio audience and berated by other politicians taking part as though he had placed himself beyond the Pale.

The fact that Ukip are routinely described as “right-wing” and not infrequently “far right” by both mainstream politicians and the mainstream media nicely demonstrates the dominance of politically correct thinking amongst those given the privilege of a public voice. Apart from their wish to leave the EU, Ukip’s policies are not radically different from those espoused by the Tories and Labour over the past twenty-five years. That applies even to immigration, because neither the Tories nor Labour has ever publicly advocated an open door policy.

The party for adolescents, the LibDems, will now be able to return to their pre-Thatcher role of being able to all fit into a telephone box at the same time.

The party for the pre-pubescent, the Greens, can be safely left until the next election dreaming up ever more ever more febrile fantasies of what the electorate wants. They will have some work to put in because they set the bar very high in this election with their plea for open borders and increased foreign aid.

Selma is the latest in an ever lengthening list of propaganda films in the politically correct interest. It is Alabama 1965. Martin Luther King is already internationally famous after his “I have a dream “ speech in 1963 and the award of the Nobel Peace prize in 1964. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is meeting with resistance and black voters are finding they still cannot register to vote because of the application of local electoral regulations in ways which are comically restrictive. King goes to the city of Selma with a clutch of supporters from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to protest about this thwarting of the law, but their attempts to help blacks register in the city fail. As a consequence a protest march from Selma to Montgomery , the Alabama state capital, is planned. The first march is stopped brutally, the second aborted by King and the third allowed to happen.

That is the skeleton of the film. There is precious little solid dramatic flesh put on the skeleton. To be brutally frank Selma is boring. It is too wordy, too cluttered with characters, too didactic and unremittingly earnest. These are qualities guaranteed to lose any cinema audience. The problem is particularly acute when, as here, there is an large cast. Disputes and debates between King and his supporters or between King and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) are so extended and detailed that anyone not familiar with the story would not know what to make of it and, in any case, as anyone who has ever been involved with an ideologically driven political group will be only too aware, of little interest to anyone who has not been captured by the ideology. Reflecting life too exactly on film is not always the best way to keep people’s attention. Propaganda films do not have to be boring, although they often are. The black director Spike Lee would have made a much less sprawling and vastly more watchable film whilst keeping the ideological message.

There is also a woeful and wilful lack of historical context. This one has at its core a vision of wicked Southern good ol’ boys oppressing blacks. White involvement is restricted to racists with a penchant for violence, a few white sympathisers with the civil rights movement who appear peripherally, adorned with looks of sublimely smug unquestioning utopian naivety not see on film since the initial sighting of a hippy commune in Easy Rider and Lyndon Johnson who is shown as sympathetic to King’s views but not interested enough to risk his political future by wholeheartedly embracing the legislation which King says is necessary . There is no attempt to see things from the viewpoint of the whites who opposed integration, unlike, for example, a film such as In the Heat of the Night in which Rod Steiger’s sheriff attempts to explain why whites in the South are as they are because of their circumstances, for example, their widely held and not unreasonable fear that a black population which has been suppressed may turn on whites . Instead Selma just rushes in and points the finger of moral shame at any white who does not uncritically embrace what King advocates with a complete disregard from the fact that every human being morally and sociologically has to start from the situation into which they are born.

The concentration of the film on a specific time and place is also problematic, because King’s ideological career was a far more complex thing than the film can show. It also removes the embarrassment which would have hung around a straightforward biopic of King, such as the plagiarism which gained him a doctorate and his marginalisation as a civil rights leader which eventually saw him reduced to going to support sewage workers at the time of his assassination. Mention is made of his gross womanising, but only in the context of a sex tape recorded by the FBI which was sent to King’s wife Cora. The fact that some who were close to him said he had a particular liking for white women – which could be taken as evidence of racism in King if his motive was to revenge himself on whites by abusing their women – goes unmentioned . Indeed, it is rather odd that a man as celebrated as King is in the USA and with a worldwide reputation should never have had a full blown biopic. Perhaps the answer is that King’s private life was too messy to deal with in a film depicting his entire public life rather than a short period of it devoted to a specific subject.

More importantly the tight focus in Selma means that the fifty odd years since Selma go unexamined. No honest person would deny that the position of blacks in the USA and particularly those in the Old South was demeaning at the beginning of the 1960s, but is what has replaced segregation and Jim Crow laws really that much better for most blacks or, perhaps more pertinently, anywhere near what King hoped would happen? Perhaps the answer to the first question is a tepid yes, at least for blacks who have benefitted from “positive discrimination”, but it has to be an unequivocal no to the latter. Segregation by choice has replaced segregation by law. Illegitimacy and crime amongst blacks has rocketed. A fair case could be made for the individual personal relationship between whites and blacks being worse now that it was fifty years ago.

Tom Wilkinson is very decent LBJ but David Oyelowo does not quite cut it as King. It is not that it is technically a bad performance, it is simply that he does not capture the charisma that King undoubtedly had. His portrayal of King keeps a question nagging away at one: why would any one have followed this rather drab character? The rest of the cast do not really have time to develop their roles, although Carmen Ejogo as Coretta Scott King and Tim Roth as George Wallace have their moments.

The insubstantial quality of the film can be judged by the meagre Oscar recognition and its popularity with the public by the money it has taken. The film was nominated for Best Picture and best song but for nothing else, which is a rather remarkable thing. Nor did it win as best picture. A public fuss was made about Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo being left out of Best Director and Best Actor categories, but only in the context of no black actors and directors being nominated. Considering the public political correctness the American film business emits, it is rather difficult to imagine that the tepid response to Selma by the Oscar granting Academy voters was the result of racism. In fact its nomination as Best Picture despite having no nominations in the directing and acting categories suggests that the opposite happened, Selma was nominated for Best Picture regardless of its mediocrity as a sop to political correctness.

The public also responded in less than passionate fashion. As of 16 April Selma had taken $52,076,908 worldwide which placed it 57th in the top grossing films of the previous 365 days. Not bad in purely commercial terms for a film which cost $20 million to make, but distinctly underwhelming for a film lauded to the skies by most critics and many public figures. The truth is that people both in the States and abroad have not been that drawn to it, whether because of the subject or the indifferent quality of the film. One can take the browbeaten horses of the Western world to the politically correct water but they can’t make many of them drink.

The pernicious nature of a film like this is not that it casts whites as the villain, but that it gives blacks and excuse for anything that goes wrong in their lives, the prize of an inexhaustible victimhood